Background
Having placed first in the financial times' global rankings for the last six years, IESE Business School attracts students from around the world to their campuses in New York, Madrid, Barcelona, and São Paulo. Where their MBA is directed towards professionals with 5-6 years of work experience, IESE's Young Talent Pathway (YTP) offers applicants who are earlier in their careers access to a boot camp-style program as well as deferred admission to the MBA.
For the business school, the YTP is a key method of building longer relationships with candidates and is an important part of their MBA recruitment pipeline.
Challenge
Keeping ‘fit’ at the forefront of admissions
IESE needed a way to screen these young, international applicants in order to assess their soft skills, language skills, and fit for both the YTP and MBA programs.
Prior to Kira, IESE required applicants to submit a video essay. However, they soon realized that the variation in submissions made it impossible to score applicants consistently. Not knowing whether applicants spent weeks, days, or hours working on their video essay made it difficult to gauge an applicant's true skill set.
“Through both the YTP application process as well as the actual course, we help applicants learn more about IESE and build a connection to our campus. By having videos embedded within the assessment, Kira really helps us do that because we can guarantee applicants are watching them.”
- Paula Amorim, Admissions Director at IESE Business SchoolSolution
Building a consistent evaluation process
By switching to Kira’s Asynchronous Assessment, IESE is able to invite every applicant to complete an assessment and still save time in the overall process. Despite the fact that applicants are applying from all over the world, each candidate is receiving the same admissions experience and the admissions team is able to maintain a level playing field across applicants.
This engaging and intentional selection progress has helped foster a very strong brand for YTP graduates within the larger IESE community.
Results
Adding efficiency to holistic admissions
“We were able to go from about 1.5 hrs per application –which includes organization time, scheduling, reading the application, and actually conducting the interview – to around 10 minutes,” Amorim shared.
“Kira helps us save time in the admissions process while enabling us to assess our applicants’ communication skills and create that personable, hands-on admissions experience that attracts applicants to our programs.”
